Q: How did you come up with
the idea for this book, and for focusing on these three particular architects?

A: When I’m not sitting at my
desk, I’m often walking and looking around me. I’ve spent some 25 years in
Jerusalem, in fact, more or less alternating between those modes—sitting,
walking, looking.

Since I tend to think
biographically, it was really only a matter of time before my musing about the
shapes of the various buildings I was seeing on those walks gave way to wondering
about the architects who’d conceived what I think of as the most striking
buildings in the modern cityscape.

Where had these men come
from? What ideas had they brought with them and what had they learned from the stones
and the sunlight, the people and ethos of the place? What future had they each
envisioned for this endlessly compelling, endlessly trying place?

Q: One of the architects you
examine has left very little biographical trace. How did you research that part
of the book, as compared with your research for the first two sections of the
book?

A: The first two architects I
write about accumulated a great deal of paper in the course of their rich and
busy lives, and much of that paper has, thankfully, been preserved.

The modernist maverick and
German-Jewish refugee Erich Mendelsohn worked mostly for institutions or politically
powerful Jewish patrons with ample secretarial staffs and spacious filing
cabinets, and his wife was obsessive about saving every scrap on which he wrote
or sketched.

During his Jerusalem years, the
deeply private public servant and British expat-in-the-East Austen St. Barbe
Harrison built exclusively for the British Government. Even though he burned
some of his own correspondence later in life, I still had a lot to work with
because of a certain English fixation on posterity and paperwork.

So when it came to writing
about those two, it was pretty clear to me which archives I’d need to explore.

The Greek-Arab Spyro Houris,
meanwhile, left very few footprints that were evident to me when I set out looking
for him in the summer of 2014, in the midst of Israel’s latest war in or on
Gaza.

There were both personal and
political reasons for this absence. Houris built entirely for private clients,
many of whom were members of the non-Jewish elite of the city during the late
Ottoman and early Mandate periods.

Much of the history of those
communities has been erased or pushed underground since 1948. As a result, I
had to be fairly relentless and, well, improvisational in thinking of other places
to hunt for his traces: I did root around in various archives, but that was
just the start of it.

Throughout that hot, violent
summer, I haunted graveyards and consulates, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate
and ecclesiastical court in the old city’s Christian quarter, ancient churches
and newer-fangled cultural centers.

I talked my way into homes
and offices and also spent a great deal of time just squinting at his buildings,
trying to read them for clues about who Houris was and what he meant to say
with his buildings.

Q: Do you see particular
themes that link all three architects' work in Jerusalem?

A: In one way or another,
they were all devoted to a kind of hybridity—buildings that fused east and
west, old and new, foreign and local. They each evolved syncretic forms and variations
on a vision of the city that was itself profoundly mixed: they saw Jerusalem as
historically and potentially a polyglot, polymorphous, essentially plural
place.

They were also each
mavericks, people thinking and designing not primarily in the name of some
ideology or political party but, first and foremost, according to their own,
hard-won notions of what a particular building—and the city at large—might be.

Q: You write that during
Houris’s lifetime, "the bonds that stretched across what are now
considered nearly impassible ethnic, national, and religious borders were not
only conceivable, they were critical to what made the city the city." How
has the city changed since the time of these three architects, and what is
their legacy today?

A: Jerusalem is still a
terrifically diverse place—but that diversity has become severely endangered.

The entire conversation that
surrounds the city has devolved in recent years to an often brutal and
reductive game of nationalist tug-of-war. You’re either pro-Israeli or you’re
pro-Palestinian; the city is either Jewish or it’s Muslim; you’re either with
us or against us; and so on.

Those blunt either/or terms
are, frankly, not only thin, they’re a travesty, given the cultural abundance
and complexity of the city’s very long and very varied past.

It’s hard to use grand terms
like “legacy” about these architects, who have been pretty much forgotten as
individuals by modern Jerusalem and its residents—though their buildings remain
some of the most recognizable and beloved in the city.Does such an unacknowledged
presence count as a legacy? I’d like to think so.

Q: What are you working on
now?

A: A short biography of Ben
Hecht for Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives Series. Hecht was one of the
greatest screenwriters in Hollywood history, a highly energetic novelist, an important
member of the Chicago Renaissance, accomplished playwright, old-fashioned,
cigar-chomping, big-city newspaperman, and charismatic propagandist for
Israel’s pre-state Jewish terrorist underground, the Irgun.

He called himself a “child of
the century” and he was just that: he drank with, ghostwrote for, dashed off
letters to everyone from Harpo Marx to Menachem Begin, Ezra Pound, Sherwood
Anderson, Lotte Lenya, H. L. Mencken, David O. Selznick, George Grosz, and
Marilyn Monroe, and he led what we might call a great big Jewish life—or in
fact multiple lives, Jewish or no.

Q: Anything else we should
know?

A: That Jerusalem is
infinitely more interesting than you’d ever know from reading The New York Times.
It’s amazing how anemic and repetitive the story is that most journalists tell
about it—amazing since the city itself is brimming with fascinating historical
layers and forgotten lives. It’s those layers and those lives I seem to spend much
of my time trying to unearth.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).